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20 February 2017

A vivid unhappiness

The third false spring came last night, when I was standing
outside the house with the recycling bin and flip-flops, speaking to the
neighbour in shirt sleeves. We were talking about the weekend, which has been
good or bad, I don’t remember, and their trip up to Lancashire to see his
in-laws. The conversation fell into property prices and I took pleasure in my
use of terminology, saying numbers like two twenty-five to refer to two hundred
twenty five thousand pounds, the counter-offer that the landlady made for our
house and how ridiculous I thought it was. I pointed at the roof, That’s going to be at least six to replace, and he nodded knowingly.

The truth is that I have been giddy about the whole thing,
feeling like Pinocchio after he becomes a real boy – I suddenly exist in this
society as the most valuable member: potential property owner. Yoko and I saw
the most perfect house the other day,
although it was out of our price range and the real estate agent seemed to
sense that. She spoke to us like children, and I resented it — in five months I
will be a Reader and I will be able
to buy any house on this road. I thought about slipping this into the
conversation even though it wasn’t really true. Instead I nodded begrudgingly when
she told us it would be good if we ‘registered our interest’, a phrase I
thought was peculiar. We walked back, Yoko and I, in the sun, feeling warm and
I had a rare moment of optimism, despite it not really being a
possibility. I imagined the two of us in that house for ten or fifteen years,
the girls coming home from university at times with young men or women and me, retiring
to the ensuite master bedroom to write
whatever I’m writing in 15 years.

In April, I am going back to Japan for the first time in
nine years – this too has produced a kind of giddiness in me. Being in Japan as
a visiting scholar and ‘foreign expert’ is a kind of dream come true, one that
a younger version of me would have been impressed by. I’m particularly looking forward
to the feeling that I don’t need to do everything as cheaply as possible, which
was the real hallmark of my life in Japan in my early twenties. No, this trip to Japan in April is markedly different from
the first time I went in 2003. That time, I went with a
friend from youth group as a missionary, sent to teach English and oblivious to the colonial undercurrent of the
whole thing. We had people lay hands us in the suburbs of Chicago, men in polo
shirts and our mothers too and I said all sorts of nonsense with conviction, testimonies full of the most awful notions of manifest destiny applied to some
nominal notion of the Orient. I had
been caught up in a narrative of purpose — we were headed to the mission field,
like Paul and Barnabas.

None of this makes sense now. I’m unrecognisable in the
pictures, with the worst mix of naivety and arrogance, like I was assuring
everyone it was okay — I had been prayed over. I happily shared my testimony in
the church we worked at, translated by a nervous woman who struggled to piece
it all together and whose struggle I didn’t fully understand. What’s the problem? I remember thinking:
just say it in Japanese. There’s
little about those first three months that stuck, as I think about it. I bought
a maroon Yamaha Vino that loved. It was almost new and only cost 60,000 yen,
but as I think about it now, I only drove it for a few months before I left for
Niigata. I remember that I put it over on its side once in the apartment car
park. I remember getting pulled over one night. Everything felt so serious,
like I was on the precipice and if I wasn’t careful, Satan could knock me off.

All that fear is gone now, completely out of my imagination,
replaced by a vivid and persistent unhappiness. I sat, as the service
started at St Peter’s, thinking about how different the world seemed now, some
15 years later. My family was sprawled out in the third pew and a woman from
the church came up with an order of service and asked if Yoko and I would be
willing to bring up the bread and the wine. We were both unsure for different
reasons — Yoko afraid of doing the wrong thing, me afraid of being found out to
be hypocrite, the apostate taking the path of least resistance. The woman was
insistent, however, so we agreed and after the peace we made our way to the
back with the girls. I took the wine and walked that long aisle up to the altar.
Hello, Stephen the Apostate is here with the blood of Christ. This is the body and
blood of Christ at least for a moment, the sun streaming through the stained
glass.